Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers

Danmaku!! Uses a lot of top down design. What is top down design? It’s where you start with a concept such as “We need to represent Reimu as a character,” and design based around that. It’s important for any game series that has an established aesthetic, and in an aesthetics driven series like Touhou it is of primary concern. Spell Cards must be beautiful.

Touhou 18: Unconnected Marketeers is the last new Touhou game we made new character cards for, having hit a nice round number of 100. After making 100 characters, we have used up most of the simple designs based purely on Danmaku mechanics, so designing characters from the top down is a way to get inspiration for new directions. This helps us ensure that all 100 characters feel and play differently.

Goutokuji Miké is a maneki neko, or lucky cat, so her concept should bring good fortune and shoo away disaster. Luck is represented here as the ability to redraw low tier (1 point) cards, increasing the overall quality of her paw. Her spell card leans into this theme, allowing her to trade her lucky draws to get a big attack, giving you something to do with that spare artifact. 

Yamashiro Takane, the Deep Mountain Business Youkai, wears camo and her ability is “manipulating forest qi.” These vague abilities tend to give us a lot of trouble when doing top-down design, since they’re often just an excuse for danmaku battles in Touhou. For Takane, we leaned into her camo and stealth abilities. Takane manipulates the forest with her spell card “Tree-Veiling Technology,” making the trees literally bend to hide her and distract pursuers.

Mechanically, we created a character that has defenses, but threatens players who choose not to (or can’t) attack her. She turned into a sniper, who spends the turn lining up the shot. Players must always ask themselves: If I don’t go out of my way to attack Takane, will I get blasted at the end of the turn?

Komakusa Sannyo dwells in the highlands and runs her parlor there. She’s the kind of lady who would tell you smoking is bad for you while she refills her pipe, so we made her so that anyone can use her spell card, “Beguiling Cloud,” which is an S-tier spell card. But doing so hurts you and helps Sannyo. Smoking is bad for you! 

Mechanically, this card provides an interesting proposition for the table: Everyone gets access to a generically powerful and useful Spell Card, but at a cost. The life lost actually means that for a player in a desperate position, this actually draws them four cards at the cost of one life. If you’re sitting on an empty hand, this can be a very tempting option. However, Sannyo gets to generate resources any time another player takes her up on the offer. Obviously if players are on Sannyo’s team, this isn’t a problem, but even her enemies might consider it a fair trade. This play pattern sometimes shows up in euro-style board games.

Tamatsukuri Misumaru crafted Reimu’s yin-yang orbs, or at least claims to have. As a crafter, her Items are better than store bought, and stealing them or destroying them is more difficult. Her kit mostly revolves around Magatama, special Items she can craft that copy other items. Yes, this lets you effectively have two artifacts at the same time.

Misumaru has been a rough character to design for, as the concept of “someone who makes magatama” is a very abstract concept outside of the very specific Touhou lore. We tried many variations of Item-based characters, but in order to not have too much overlap with our existing character pool, they often ended up being a lot of yapping on the card and not a lot of meaningful play. While we’ve tried to avoid having too many characters with their own custom token cards, we decided that Magatama are iconic enough that it’s okay in this case.

Kudamaki Tsukasa, the wicked white fox, was largely responsible for the events of Touhou 18. Along with Sannyo and Narumi, Tsukasa is the third in the brand new “I have a proposition for you” character archetype. She teaches people that violence (against her) is not in their own best interest. Violence against others is very interesting! 

Mechanically kind of the opposite of Takane, Tsukasa presents the following proposition to her opponents: I will bribe you to kill each other, but if you take the bribe, I get immunity. The obvious solution is for people to just agree to not take the bribe, but this creates a prisoner’s dilemma where the urge to defect is strong. Never underestimate soft power! In the case someone does turn against Tsukasa, her Spell Card packs another mighty disincentive to attack her. By the time people realize she’s the actual problem, it might be too late to stop her.

Iizunamaru Megumu is “capable of manipulating the starry sky.” We decided this means she has the power to choose what’s written in the stars, and by the stars, we mean the cards in hand. Megumu is always living in the moment, completely refreshing her hand each round. If she does end up with a poor draw, Wild Dance of Starfire allows her to spin it again. Simply keep trying until you get it right!

Megumu’s play pattern encourages aggressively and actively playing out your cards. In the right hands, Megumu can have explosive turns, but this play style actively discourages sitting back and turtling. The stars keep spinning, with or without you.

Tenkyuu Chimata is the god of special event markets (read:Comiket). Thus in Danmaku!!, her services are for sale! She’ll attack someone for you! You can buy her Spell Card! You can buy a life. Now that’s fantasy! 

This ended up being a character built almost entirely on her fiction, and this resulted in a text box that is intimidating to read, but relatively easy to play in practice. More importantly, we’ve seen people seriously have fun leaning into the bit, hawking their wares to the table. In general, we like to aim for simplicity, but we are willing to bend this rule when it leads to fun gameplay.

Himemushi Momoyo is “capable of eating dragons.” Initially we wanted to ignore this and make a bunch of Minecraft references, but that turned out to be a creative dead end. Instead we decided that “eating dragons” meant that she could take down characters in a strong position. She is really good at doing that.

Momoyo is one of several characters whose effect changes when there are three or fewer players. This is generally the turning point where roles are identified, distance stops being as relevant, and the game becomes more focused on dogfighting between individual players. Momoyo’s dethrone ability was unsatisfying during the early game with lots of players if she somehow ended up the life leader. For that reason, we let her benefit from being the king of the hill, highly incentivizing other players to attack her to knock her down. This proved to be a “win more” scenario when she gets down to 1v1, so we had to tone it down. The final shape leads to an interesting dynamic that is powerful and relevant throughout the game.